The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  THERE WAS STRONG RESISTANCE in the U.S. Congress to liberating Kuwait by force. Georgia’s Democratic senator Sam Nunn, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, favored sanctions and diplomacy and found many retired government and military leaders to support him in televised Senate hearings in late November 1990. He was concerned that the continuing U.S. buildup in Saudi Arabia would make war inevitable; Colin Powell had almost doubled his troop requirements, from 250,000 to 400,000, earlier that month. Bush sketched the resistance in his diary:

  November 28 [1990]27

  The debate is raging now and Sam Nunn, I think running for president, is trying to decide how hard to push. [Congressman Richard] Gephardt “breaks” with the President, saying “no use of force, sanctions must work.” None of them seem concerned about the hostages, none of them share my anxiety about the Embassy.… It’s ironic, the isolationistic right lined with the [Yale president and anti-Vietnam War activist] Kingman Brewster left [voicing the] Vietnam syndrome. Bob Kerrey, a true war hero in Vietnam and John Glenn, also a hero, “no force, no force.”

  Projections of American casualties for a ground war with Saddam Hussein, whose forces in Kuwait were approaching the half-million mark—he had even called up seventeen-year-olds—ranged from military estimates of below two thousand U.S. combatants to civilian projections of twenty thousand or more. The former secretary of defense Robert McNamara put the number at thirty thousand, former senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern at fifty thousand. Beyond the conflicting casualty estimates, however, the war decision had become a debate over presidential versus congressional authority in this first major U.S. confrontation since Vietnam. Congress wanted the president to seek its approval to wage war with Iraq, as the U.S. Constitution required. Bush was willing to do so, but he worried that Congress might vote war down.

  Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had been a congressman at the time of the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal, which revealed, in Reagan’s words, that “what began as a strategic28 opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages.” Cheney had always been a denizen of the far right—“somewhat to the right29 of … Genghis Khan,” a waggish colleague had observed of him as far back as his early days in the Gerald Ford White House—and he emerged from his party’s Iran-Contra disaster vehemently opposed to seeking congressional approval of presidential decisions in foreign affairs. Discussing the lessons of Iran-Contra on a 1987 television news program, he had argued:

  I think you have to preserve30 the prerogative of the President in extraordinary circumstances not to notify the Congress at all [of covert actions]. Or to exercise discretion to wait for days or weeks, or even months [before doing so]. I think that’s within his constitutional prerogative.… I don’t think that you can pass a law that will guarantee no future president will make mistakes, and I think we have to guard against passing laws now that will restrict some future president in a future crisis that we can only guess at at present.

  Armed with this extreme view of presidential prerogative, Cheney pointedly disagreed with Senator Edward Kennedy in a December 1990 Armed Services Committee hearing about needing congressional approval to go to war against Iraq:

  SENATOR KENNEDY:31 Secretary Cheney, you’re a former member of the House of Representatives, and you’re fully aware of what the Constitution says with regards to the war-making power.… But the President still refuses to ask the one body that the Constitution requires him to ask, which is the United States Congress, about the declaration of war.…

  Yesterday, Secretary Baker suggested more ominously that if President Bush does go to war, he expects that Congress will rally around the President after he has committed the troops to combat. And one would gather that the President effectively is thumbing his nose at Congress. He’s really daring us to act if we disagree with him. He’s telling us that the decision whether to go to war is his, and effectively his alone, to make. And he apparently is not going to let Congress interfere with him.

  Now, barring an act of provocation, do you agree that the President must obtain the approval of Congress in advance before the United States attacks Iraq?

  SECRETARY CHENEY: Senator, I do not believe the President requires any additional authorization from the Congress before committing US forces to achieve our objectives in the Gulf.

  “It’s such a vital problem,”32 Cheney argued with Bush, “that we have no choice but to move in and liberate Kuwait. Even if the Congress votes no, we’d still have to do it. Asking for their approval and being turned down would create a major confrontation with the Congress of having asked for their authority and having it denied. We would then have to say, ‘Well, we don’t need them anyway, we’ve got the authority to proceed.’”

  Rejecting Cheney’s arguments, Bush chose to seek a congressional resolution supporting a war. He lobbied Congress intensely through December and early January against a U.N. deadline for Iraqi compliance set for 15 January 1991. James Baker met one final time with Iraq’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, in Geneva on 9 January and told him bluntly what would happen to his country if it failed to comply with the U.N. deadline. “I also warned him33 of severe reprisals for using chemical or biological weapons,” Baker writes. “‘This is not a threat,’ I said, ‘it’s a promise.’” Baker was hinting at a nuclear response, although Bush had ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in the impending war. Aziz responded by refusing to deliver a letter summarizing Baker’s warnings from Baker to Saddam, calling it an insult.

  Both houses of Congress approved war resolutions on 12 January, three days before the U.N. deadline, but the margins were narrow: 250–183 in the House, 52–47 in the Senate. Despite Cheney’s objections, Bush had taken the risk and won the support he needed. Congress, and by extension the American people, would share responsibility for the war.

  IN BAGHDAD, Joe Wilson had been working behind the scenes to persuade Saddam Hussein to release the hostages he was holding. Wilson met with the Arab press and dogged the Iraqi foreign ministry, arguing that “holding on to the hostages34 was not in Saddam’s interest, unless he wanted to go to war over that issue rather than over his continued occupation of Kuwait.” Through an influential Arab journalist with whom he had lunch, Wilson believes, his message reached King Hussein of Jordan. The king and Yasir Arafat met with Saddam in Baghdad in early December; Wilson says they laid out the same case he had made against continuing to hold the hostages:

  That meeting with the king35 and Arafat was the real clincher. Saddam, who had just invited the wives of the hostages to return to Baghdad to see their husbands, announced on December 6 that Iraq’s defenses were now strong enough to withstand an American offensive, so the hostages could now go home. We were elated and went back into the charter aircraft business.

  When the hostages got home to the United States, they found themselves invited to turn in the clothes they had worn during their captivity. From the clothing of hostages who had been held at Tuwaitha, who had been transported to the gymnasium there for exercise on buses that were also used by Tuwaitha workers, U.S. scientists extracted microscopic particles of uranium. “They ran the analysis,”36 David Kay told me, “and to their surprise the uranium was depleted”—i.e., it was anomalously low in U235—“at a level that would only be possible if you were sitting on top of a calutron, essentially.” A calutron is a machine that accelerates uranium atoms through a magnetic field to separate U235 from U238, a process known as electromagnetic isotope separation, or EMIS; it was invented at the University of California early in the Second World War and first used to enrich uranium for the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Jere Nichols, a chemical engineer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory who was involved in the investigation, said later that the uranium isotopics “showed that there was uranium-23837 in the sample—and essentially none of the other uranium isotopes. These isotopics could only have been obtained as the tailings from an electromagnetic isotope separation sy
stem.”

  Kay called this information “the initial clue” to the fact that Iraq was using EMIS technology to enrich uranium. It was not a clue that the U.S. intelligence community judged to be credible, however. “Some of us believed38 that EMIS was the primary method of uranium separation in Iraq,” Nichols recalled, “but the deciding votes, back in those days, were cast by people who believed that a proliferator would not use that old-fashioned, power-intensive technology. They had concluded that Iraq must be using centrifuge technology for uranium enrichment.” Since knowing what you’re looking for is the key to successful investigation, looking for centrifuges when they should have been looking for Baghdadtrons, as the Iraqis called their version of the calutron, would be at least a misdirection of time and resources.

  The other problem with assessing the Tuwaitha collections was that the process used to analyze the Tuwaitha uranium dust, called neutron-activation analysis, involved irradiating the particles in a nuclear reactor. “The reactor that did it39 was out in California,” David Kay says, “and it was not big and it was almost a handicraft process to do it. It took almost six weeks, so the results weren’t available until after the war was over.”

  IN NOVEMBER, visiting U.S. marines in the Saudi desert on a Thanksgiving tour, George Bush emphasized the urgency of Iraq’s race toward nuclear weapons. “Those who would measure40 the timetable for Saddam Hussein’s atomic weapons program in years,” he claimed, “may be underestimating the reality of the situation and the gravity of that threat. No one knows precisely when this dictator may acquire atomic weapons or who they may be aimed at down the road. But we do know this for sure: He has never possessed a weapon that he hasn’t used.”

  By emphasizing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Bush was pursuing his political agenda of enlarging the purpose of a war beyond the liberation of Kuwait. He also, writes William Arkin, had received an early November analysis from the Joint Atomic Intelligence Committee, an interagency group, “which concluded41 … that with a ‘crash program’ Iraq could produce one or two ‘crude nuclear explosive devices’ in as little as six months to a year.” As the possibility of going to war hardened toward certainty, the problem also emerged of keeping Israel pacified, to avoid shattering the largely Arab coalition Bush was assembling should the Jewish state opt in. Israel made its price clear in a message to James Baker on 4 December: for Israel to stay out of the war, the U.S. would have to eliminate Iraq’s WMD. An analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv explained Israel’s reasoning three days later in an assessment: “In the [government of Israel’s] view,42 even a complete [Iraqi] withdrawal would be problematic if it left Iraq’s conventional and especially nuclear arsenal [sic] intact.”

  Bush intended to destroy the Iraqi nuclear-weapons program anyway as part of reducing Saddam’s war-making capabilities. But what if Saddam pulled his forces out of Kuwait as soon as the war began and stood down? An order went out to the air-war planners in Riyadh that the Iraqi “capability to produce43 and use weapons of mass destruction” should be destroyed as early as possible in the war. “Thus,” Arkin writes, “two weeks before the air war would begin, a new plan emerged. It would compress six days of attacks into three, nearly doubling the number of sorties flown during the first 72 hours and emphasizing Washington’s requirement that all nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) targets be visited by the end of Day Two.” The price of compressing the attacks into a shorter period of time was that the targets would be hit with fewer bombs. Instead of eight F-117As dropping eight bombs on each target, the targets would be “functionally impaired” with one or two bombs each. As it turned out, the high-precision attacks were effective despite their limited scale; but only about half of the eighteen nuclear-production sites44 in Iraq were known to the coalition at the outset of the war. The other half were left unscathed.

  THE UNITED NATIONS coalition attack on Iraq began at seven p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, 16 January 1991—three a.m. on 17 January in Baghdad. I was traveling with my wife-to-be at the time on a careening speed-freak-driven bus across Thailand from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, and caught CNN’s green night-vision coverage of the initial air assault on a television set in the bar of a rest stop, a bowling alley surrounded by paddy fields in the middle of the country; the Thais gathered around the TV, who still remembered their flush days as purveyors of R & R to U.S. soldiers fighting next door in Vietnam, were cheering as the bombs exploded and the streaking antiaircraft fire swayed across the green sky. The green night-vision images, surging white as the explosions overloaded the amplifier, hinted at the high technologies the U.S. would first introduce in that brief, overwhelming war.

  The primary targets of the air assault that first night were Iraq’s air defenses and electric grid. Decapitating the Iraqi leadership—preferably by killing Saddam—received equal weight, Arkin writes:

  This was indeed a new era45 of warfare. Despite all the attention heaped on Stealth [technology], in the first wave more [U.S. Navy Tomahawk] cruise missiles were directed at Baghdad targets than were [F-117A] Stealth fighters.

  Though the Tomahawks’ reliability and accuracy were questioned, even by many in the Navy, their use did not put pilots’ lives at risk. Eight missiles were targeted on Saddam’s New Presidential Palace along the Tigris River, six on Ba’ath Party headquarters to its south.

  Electrical power plants were attacked with special variants of the Tomahawk that dispensed a spider-like web of filaments to cause them to short-circuit.… The special warheads would disable electrical distribution without destroying generating capacity, minimizing the long-term effect on the civilian population.

  Tuwaitha was hit on 18 January, the second night of the air war. Sea-launched Tomahawks and F-111F fighter-bombers carrying laser-guided bombs totally destroyed the reactors and other installations there. Targeters could not target what was unknown to them, but one installation that proved to be an important nuclear site was fortuitously hit later. As David Kay tells the story:

  During the second week46 of the air campaign there was a pilot rolling out of Baghdad who still had armament left. The rule of thumb is, one does not land aircraft with armament still aboard, especially on carrier decks. So pilots, if they have an approved secondary target, will dump, and if they don’t have an approved secondary target, they’ll still dump. So he looked down, he had a secondary target and the AWACS plane told him there wasn’t much antiaircraft in that direction. So he rolled on the secondary target, he found the biggest building he could find and he just dumped the bombs on it and went home.

  Because it had been a secondary target, the battle damage assessment took about two days—two days before anyone flew a photo mission. Well, the photo mission saw these big circular objects and something like six big cranes and over a hundred people around this building pulling things out. Now a good rule of military intelligence is, if something happens in combat that you don’t understand, blow the shit out of it and worry later about figuring out what it was. So they directed a B-52 raid across this site. It was like clearing a swath for a freeway; they just started at one end and dumped it.

  The mystery site, located about eighteen miles northwest of Baghdad on the Tigris River, was called Tarmiya, but what the “big circular objects” were, no one yet knew.

  Smoke from burning Kuwaiti oil wells first showed up on satellite images on 8 February 1991. By 15 February, at least 50 wells47 were billowing fire and dense black smoke. These first fires were probably ignited accidentally by coalition aircraft bombing Iraqi forces holding defensive positions in the oil fields. On television shortly after the beginning of the war, Saddam had threatened to “use oil for self-defense,”48 and beginning on 16 February, as his forces moved to retreat from Kuwait, they began systematically blowing the caps off Kuwaiti oil wells with plastic explosives and deliberately igniting the gush. By 24 February, 792 wells had been set ablaze; the oil burned so hot that air temperatures in the immediate vicinity of the fires were raised to nearly
1,000° F. Every day, six million barrels of oil—more than 10 percent of the world’s daily production—went up in flames. It took eight months to blow out the fires and cap the wells; in the end, Kuwait lost 85 percent of its oil-production capacity.

  The air war gave way to the ground war. Hostilities continued until 27 February 1991. “The Gulf War was49 the war against the Russians we didn’t have,” Colin Powell would say. “There were no trees and no hills, but that’s what we were trained to fight. The Iraqis sat there and we kicked the shit out of them.” In some 110,000 combat air sorties flown, the coalition lost only thirty-eight aircraft. Only 148 Americans died in battle; only 467 were wounded. Iraqi losses were substantial: up to 65,000 combat casualties. Where Iraqi troops defended from a line of World War I–style trenches, U.S. engineers in armored bulldozers simply dozed them under. By the end of the war, 86,000 Iraqi soldiers had surrendered, most of them young and frightened conscripts.

  DESERT STORM WAS a limited war, and deliberately so. Although Colin Powell would have been happy, as he said, to have killed Saddam Hussein, George Bush had no desire to push on to Baghdad and take over the country once Kuwait was liberated and Iraq’s military potential reduced. Responding to critics at a postwar press conference who said he should have gone into Baghdad, Bush answered impatiently, “Yes, and do what?”50 Cheney also defended the administration’s limited goals at a Washington symposium in late April 1991: